In a series of proclamations from Lyons and later from the Tuileries, Napoleon swiftly undid many of the more unpopular Bourbon reforms. He cancelled changes in judicial tribunals, orders and decorations, restored the tricolour and the Imperial Guard, sequestered property owned by the Bourbons, annulled the changes to the Légion d’Honneur and restored to the regiments their old number designations that the Bourbons, with scant regard for military psychology, had replaced with royalist names. He also dissolved the legislature and convoked the electoral colleges of the Empire to meet in Paris in June at the Champ de Mars to acclaim the new constitution he was planning and ‘assist at the coronation’ of the Empress and the King of Rome.22 ‘Of all that individuals have done, written, or said, since the taking of Paris,’ he promised, ‘I shall for ever remain ignorant.’23 He was as good as his word; it was the only sensible basis on which to attempt to restore national unity. But this did not prevent yet another rising in the Vendée, against which Napoleon was forced to deploy 25,000 troops in an Army of the Loire under Lamarque, including newly raised Young Guard units that would have been invaluable at Waterloo. Troops also had to be sent to Marseilles – which hoisted the tricolour only in mid-April – Nantes, Angers and Saumur and a number of other places in a way that had not been necessary in earlier campaigns, except 1814.24
Napoleon made good on his promise to abolish the hated droits réunis taxes on returning to power, but this reduced his ability to pay for the coming campaign.25 Gaudin, who returned to the finance ministry, was told on April 3 that provisioning the army for the coming campaign would require an extra 100 million francs. ‘I think that all the other budgets can be reduced,’ Napoleon told him, ‘given that ministers have allowed themselves much more than they really need.’26 (Despite austerity measures, he still managed to find 200,000 francs in the imperial household budget for ‘musicians, singers, etc.’27) Gaudin drew heavily on the Civil List, took 3 million francs in gold and silver from the cashier-general of Paris, raised 675,000 francs in timber taxes, borrowed 1.26 million francs from the Banque de France, sold 380,000 francs’ worth of shares in the Canal du Midi, which, along with the sale of 1816 bonds and other government assets, as well as a tax on salt-mines and other industries, raised 17,434,352 francs in total.28 It would have to be a swift and instantly victorious campaign, as France could clearly not afford a drawn out series of engagements.
In order to substantiate his claim to wish to govern France liberally, Napoleon asked the moderate Benjamin Constant to return from internal exile in the Vendée and draw up a new constitution, to be called the Acte Additionnel aux Constitutions de l’Empire. This provided for a bicameral legislature which would share powers with the Emperor on the British model, a two-stage electoral system, trial by jury, freedom of expression and even powers of impeachment of ministers. In his diary at the time, Constant described Napoleon, whom he had earlier derided in published pamphlets as akin to Genghis Khan and Attila, as ‘a man who listens’.29 Napoleon later explained that he had wanted ‘to substantiate all the late innovations’ in the new constitution to make it harder for anyone to restore the Bourbons.30 Napoleon also ended all censorship (so much so that even the manifestos of enemy generals could be read in the French press), abolished the slave trade entirely, invited Madame de Stäel and the American Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette into his new coalition (both distrusted Napoleon and refused*), and ordered that no Britons were to be detained or harassed. He also told the Conseil that he had entirely renounced all imperial ideas and that ‘henceforth the happiness and the consolidation’ of France ‘shall be the object of all my thoughts’.31 On April 4 he wrote to the monarchs of Europe, ‘After presenting the spectacle of great campaigns to the world, from now on it will be more pleasant to know no other rivalry than that of the benefits of peace, of no other struggle than the holy conflict of the happiness of peoples.’32
Historians have tended to scoff at these measures and statements, yet such was the exhausted state of France in 1815, with most of the population wanting peace, that if he had remained in power Napoleon might very well have returned to the kind of pacific government of national unity that he had operated during the Consulate. But his longtime foes could not believe he would give up his imperial ambitions, and certainly could not take the risk that he would do so. Nor could they have guessed that he would be dead in six years. Instead, as one British MP not unreasonably put it, it was assumed that peace ‘must always be uncertain with such a man, and … whilst he reigns, would require a constant armament, and hostile preparations more intolerable than war itself’.33 On March 25 the Allies, still in congress at Vienna, formed a Seventh Coalition against him.
Napoleon took advantage of his brief return to power to restart various public works in Paris, including the elephant fountain at the Bastille, a new market place at Saint-Germain, the foreign ministry at the Quai d’Orsay and at the Louvre.34 Talma went back to teaching acting at the Conservatory, which had been closed by the Bourbons; Denon the Louvre director, David the painter, Fontaine the architect and Corvisart the doctor returned to their old jobs in the arts and medicine; Carle Vernet’s painting of Marengo was rehung at the Louvre, and some of the standards captured in the Napoleonic campaigns were put up in the Senate and Legislative Body.35 On March 31 Napoleon visited the orphaned daughters of members of the Légion d’Honneur, whose school at Saint-Denis had had its funding cut by the Bourbons. That same day he restored the University of France to its former footing, re-appointing the Comte de Lacépède as chancellor. The Institut de France also reinstated Napoleon as a member. At a concert at the Tuileries that March to celebrate his return, the thirty-six-year-old Anne Hippolyte Boutet Salvetat, a celebrated actress known as Mademoiselle Mars, and Napoleon’s old flame from the Italian campaign, Mademoiselle George, both wore the new Bonapartist emblem inspired by his springtime reappearance – a sprig of violets.
Yet none of these acts of public relations could dispel the growing belief on the part of most Frenchmen that disaster loomed. In April, conscription was extended to hitherto exempted married men. That month John Cam Hobhouse, a twenty-eight-year-old Radical writer and future British cabinet minister who was at the time living in Paris, noted: ‘Napoleon is not popular, except with the actual army, and with the inhabitants of certain departments; and, perhaps even with them, his popularity is only relative.’ Hobhouse was a fanatical Bonapartist, yet even he had to admit that the Saint-Germain nobles hated Napoleon, that the shopkeepers wanted peace and that although the regiments cried out ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ with feeling there was no echo from the populace, who made ‘no noise nor any acclamations; a few low murmurs and whispers were alone heard’ when the Emperor rode through the city.36 By mid-April the conspicuous non-arrival from Vienna of Marie Louise and the King of Rome – ‘the rose and the rosebud’ as propagandists termed them – further alerted Parisians to the inevitability of war.37
At the Tuileries on April 16 Hobhouse watched Napoleon reviewing twenty-four battalions of the National Guard – which now accepted all able-bodied men between the ages of twenty and sixty. As the troops took two hours to march past, and Hobhouse was standing only ten yards away, he had ample opportunity to study his hero, who he thought looked nothing like his portraits:
His face was of a deadly pale; his jaws overhung, but not so much as I had heard; his lips thin, but partially curled … His hair was of a dark dusky brown, scattered thinly over his temples: The crown of his head was bald … He was not fat in the upper part of his body, but projected considerably in the abdomen, so much so that his linen appeared beneath his waistcoat. He generally stood with his hands knit or folded before him … played with his nose; took snuff three or four times, and looked at his watch. He seemed to have a labouring in his chest, sighing or swallowing his spittle. He very seldom spoke, but when he did, smiled, in some sort, agreeably. He … went through the whole tedious ceremony with an air of sedate impatience.38
Al
though some soldiers stepped out of the ranks to deliver their petitions to the grenadier on guard – a hangover from the revolutionary army tradition – when others seemed scared of doing so Napoleon beckoned to have their petitions collected. One was presented by a six-year-old child dressed in a pioneer uniform, complete with false beard; he gave it to the Emperor on the end of a battle-axe, and Napoleon ‘took and read [it] very complacently’.39
On April 22, 1815 Constant published the Acte Additionnel, which was then put to a plebiscite: 1,552,942 voted yes and 5,740 voted no, numbers which need to be treated with the same reservations as in earlier plebiscites. (People who voted both yes and no in error counted as a yes, for example; the overall turnout was only 22 per cent.40 In the Seine-Inférieure, only 11,011 yes and 34 no votes were cast, compared with 62,218 who voted in the 1804 plebiscite.41) ‘At no period in his life had I seen him enjoy more unruffled tranquillity,’ recorded Lavalette, who reported to Napoleon daily. He put this down to the endorsement of the Acte Additionnel, which managed to blur political distinctions between liberals, moderate republicans, Jacobins and Bonapartists in what has been dubbed ‘Revolutionary Bonapartism’.42
By late April 1815 a generally spontaneous fédéré militia movement was growing to hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen whose aim was to rebuild the sense of national unity France was believed to have felt at the time of the fall of the Bastille.43 The fédérés held assemblies twice a week and required a signed commitment and sworn oath to confront the Bourbons with force; in much of the country they kept the royalists quiescent (at least until Waterloo, after which they were brutally suppressed).44 Only in the fiercely anti-Bonapartist parts of France – Flanders, Artois, the Vendée and the Midi – did Revolutionary Bonapartism get nowhere. Otherwise it crossed the social classes: in Rennes the middle classes dominated the local fédéré organization whereas in Dijon it was made up of working men, while in Rouen it was indistinguishable from the National Guard. The fédérés had no effect on the war, but they were an indication of the widespread support Napoleon enjoyed in the country, and that he might have been able to stir up a guerrilla campaign after Waterloo had he chosen to do so.
On May 15 the Allies formally declared war on France. Molé saw Napoleon at the Élysée Palace, where he had moved for its secluded garden, two days later and found him ‘gloomy and depressed, yet calm’. They spoke of the possible partition of the country.45 In public Napoleon maintained his customary sangfroid, however. At a review of five battalions of the Line and four of the Young Guard at the Tuileries later that month he was pulling grenadiers’ noses and playfully slapping a colonel, after which ‘the officer went away, smiling and showing his cheek, which was red with the blow.’46
The Acte Additionnel was ratified at a gigantic open-air ritual called the Champ de Mai, which confusingly took place on the Champ de Mars, outside the École Militaire, on June 1. ‘The sun, flashing on sixty thousand bayonets,’ recalled Thiébault, ‘seemed to make the vast space sparkle.’47 During this strange mixture of religious, political and military ceremony, loosely based on one of Charlemagne’s traditions, Napoleon, wearing a purple costume not unlike his coronation mantle, spoke to 15,000 seated Frenchmen and over 100,000 more milling in the crowd. ‘As emperor, consul, soldier, I owe everything to the people,’ he said. ‘In prosperity, in adversity, on the battlefield, in counsel, enthroned, in exile, France has been the sole and constant object of my thoughts and actions. Like the King of Athens, I sacrificed myself for my people in the hope of seeing fulfilled the promise to preserve for France her natural integrity, honour and rights.’48* He went on to explain that he had been brought back to power by public indignation at the treatment of France and that he had counted on a long peace because the Allies had signed treaties with France – which they were now breaking by building up forces in Holland, partitioning Alsace-Lorraine and preparing for war. He ended by saying, ‘My own glory, honour and happiness are indistinguishable from those of France.’ Needless to say, the speech was followed by prolonged cheering, before a massive march-past by the army, departmental representatives and National Guard.49 The whole court, Conseil, senior judiciary and diplomatic and officer corps in their uniforms were present, and ladies in their diamonds. With a hundred-gun salute, drumrolls, a vast amphitheatre, eagles emblazoned with the names of each department, gilded carriages, solemn oaths, a chanted Te Deum, red-coated lancers, an altar presided over by archbishops and heralds in their finery, it was an imposing spectacle.50 During Mass, Napoleon looked at the assembly through an opera glass. Hobhouse had to admit that when the Emperor ‘plumped himself down on his throne and rolled his mantle round him he looked very ungainly and squat’.
The newly elected chambers took their oath of allegiance to the Emperor with minimal difficulty two days later, even though the elections the previous month had resulted in a number of constitutionalists, liberals, crypto-royalists and Jacobins being elected. With the lower house immediately sidetracked into an ill-tempered debate about whether members should be allowed to read speeches from notes hidden in their hats, the legislature was unlikely to cause Napoleon much immediate cause for concern, despite the fact that his long-term opponent, the former senator the Comte Lanjuinais, had been elected its president and Lafayette was now a deputy. There was a huge firework display in the Place de la Concorde the following evening, which featured Napoleon arriving in a ship from Elba. As a spectator recorded: ‘The mob cried “Vive l’Empereur and the fireworks!” and the reign of the Constitutional Monarchy began.’51 Of course it wasn’t a constitutional monarchy as in Britain, since the ministers were all appointed by Napoleon, who was his own prime minister, but neither was it the unfettered dictatorship of the pre-1814 period, and it seemed possible that it might evolve liberally.
Napoleon knew that his success or failure would ultimately be determined solely on the battlefield. On June 7 he ordered Bertrand to get his telescopes, uniforms, horses and carriages made ready ‘so that I can leave two hours after having given the order’, adding: ‘As I will be camping often, it is important that I have my iron beds and tents.’52 That same day he told Drouot: ‘I was pained to see that the men in the two battalions that left this morning had only one pair of boots each.’53 Two days later, on June 9, 1815, the Allies signed the Treaty of Vienna. Under Article I they reaffirmed their intention of forcing Napoleon from the throne, and under Article III they agreed that they would not lay down their arms until this was achieved.54
As early as March 27 Napoleon had told Davout that ‘the Army of the North will be the principal army’, as the closest Allied forces were in Flanders and he certainly did not intend to wait for Schwarzenberg’s return to France.55 At 4 a.m. on Monday, June 12 Napoleon left the Élysée to join the Army of the North at Avesnes, where he dined with Ney the next day. By noon on the 15th he was at Charleroi in Belgium, ready to engage the Prussian army under Blücher near Fleurus. He hoped to defeat Blücher before falling on an Anglo-Dutch-Belgian-German force under Wellington, 36 per cent of whose troops were British while 49 per cent spoke German as their first language.
Napoleon later said that ‘he had relied mainly … upon the idea, that a victory over the English army in Belgium … would have been sufficient to have produced a change of administration in England, and have afforded him a chance of concluding an immediate general truce.’56 Capturing Brussels, part of the French Empire until 1814, would also have been good for morale. To fight was a risk, but not so great a risk as waiting until the vast Austrian and Russian armies were ready to strike at Paris once again. Across Europe, 280,000 French soldiers faced around 800,000 Allies, although the Austrian contingent would not be in theatre for several weeks, and the Russians not for months. ‘If they enter France,’ Napoleon told the army from Avesnes on June 14, ‘therein they will find their tomb … For all the French who have the courage, the time has come to vanquish or perish!’57
The opening stages of the campaign saw him reviving the best of
the strategic abilities he had shown the previous year. The French were even more scattered than the Allies at first, across an area 175 miles wide by 100 deep, but Napoleon used this fact to feint towards the west and then concentrate in the centre in classic bataillon carré style. The manoeuvring of the 125,000-strong Army of the North between June 6 and the 15th allowed it to cross the rivers at Marchienne, Charleroi and Châtelet without any Allied reaction of note. Wellington, who had arrived post-haste from Vienna on April 5, had been forced to string his force out along a 62-mile-wide front, trying simultaneously to guard the routes to Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent. He frustratedly acknowledged as much when he said on the evening of June 15, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God.’58
Napoleon’s speed and tactical ability allowed him once again to strike at the hinge between the armies opposing him, as he had been doing for nearly twenty years. His manoeuvres were all the more impressive as half of his army was made up of raw recruits. Although veterans had been released from Spanish, Russian and Austrian prisoner-of-war camps, after the initial rush of enthusiasm only 15,000 volunteers had joined the colours, so conscription provided the balance. Morale among the troops was shaky, especially after the former Chouan leader, General Bourmont, and his staff defected to the Allies on the morning of the 15th.59 Some of the men understandably asked why generals who had pledged oaths to the Bourbons, such as Soult, Ney, Kellermann and Bourmont, had been allowed back at all. Low morale led to poor discipline, with the Imperial Guard plundering freely in Belgium and laughing at the gendarmes sent to stop them.60 Equipment was also wanting: the 14th Légère had no shakos, the 11th Cuirassiers no breastplates. (‘Breastplates aren’t necessary to make war,’ Napoleon blithely told Davout on June 3.) The Prussians reported that some battalions of the Imperial Guard, reconstituted on March 13 when Napoleon was in Lyons, looked more like a militia, wearing an assortment of forage caps and bicornes instead of their fearsome bearskins. The Middle Guard, disbanded by the Bourbons, had been recalled only the previous month.
Napoleon the Great Page 91
